Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/93

 immigrants of Japanese or Chinese nationality. It was against similar exclusiveness on Japan's part that the Powers of the West inveighed when they required her to open her gates, and the contrast between their preaching then and their practice subsequently cannot but strike Eastern nations.

The Chinese complication in 1900 was suggestive in another respect also. During the war in 1894-1895, a section of the Japanese army, invading the Liao-tung peninsula, committed some cruel excesses at Port Arthur. There were extenuating circumstances. The men had been exasperated beyond endurance by finding the bones of two of their comrades who had been roasted to death by the Chinese, and the remnants of others who had been shockingly mutilated, and, moreover, the civilian inhabitants of Port Arthur whom the Japanese slew were believed to be soldiers in disguise. Foreign critics, however, refused to take these circumstances into account. A veritable shout of indignation was raised; newspapers wrote as though the Japanese, permanently forfeiting their title to be called civilised, had re-established their affinity with Oriental barbarians; this one incident of a war conducted on all other occasions with marked humanity and unvarying respect for the best principles of international morality, was magnified into a heinous act of savagery, and altogether it seemed as though Europe and America were